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You'd think Apple would have given you a keyboard shortcut for full-screen mode.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
'Preview' is missing an important function in OS X
Sept. 1, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
Apple did Mac OS X users a disservice when it designed the Preview application. Preview is powerful and can do almost anything an image viewer and converter ought to do. Note that I wrote "almost."
Therein hangs a tale.
Preview has four basic roles in a stock OS X installation:
It displays any kind of image. (If Preview can't show it, nothing can, except possibly GraphicConverter.)
It displays page-by-page views of PDF documents. (Apple based the graphics system of OS X on PDF, and Preview is a superb PDF viewer.)
It converts images from one format to another, and can also turn PDFs into images. (When you take a screen capture in OS X, you get a PDF file. Just drop that PDF onto the Preview icon and use the "Export" function in the File menu and choose a lossless image method such as TIFF in the "Format" menu at the bottom of the file browser window.)
It displays images in thumbnail views. Clicking once on a thumbnail shows that image in Preview's main window. Pressing the Page Up or Page Down key does the same thing.
Preview's big shortcoming is in the way it mishandles full-screen viewing. Any image viewer that purports to be a serious application should be able to display images full-screen without a fuss. Preview can't do that.
What it CAN do is almost good enough. But when you miss the target, you miss it no matter how close your arrow flies.
Here's the scenario. You have an image you want to view, so you drag the image's icon (or its text entry in a Finder list) onto the Preview icon in the Dock or on your desktop.
Does Preview open the image full-screen? Nope. Is there a preference setting that tells Preview to open all images full-screen? Double nope.
Ah, but there's a way to show an image full-screen once it's loaded. You'd think Apple would have given you a keyboard shortcut for full-screen mode, so you could just press a key to make any image currently in Preview full-screen.
Triple nope.
You have to click the View menu and choose "Full Screen." Then you have to click once anywhere on the image to get rid of an annoying message about how to get rid of full-screen mode. (Earth to Apple: The Escape key has been around long enough. You don't need to keep reminding us to escape from a non-standard mode by pressing Escape.)
All together now: ARGH!
There. That's better. At least Apple programmed Preview to handle hundreds of images at the same time. To get a usable full-screen mode, drag all the images in a folder to the Preview icon, view the first one, change to full-screen mode, then press the Page Up and Page Down keys to show the next or previous image full-screen.
That's helpful, but it's no substitute for proper design. Next week I'll tell you how to supplement Preview with a few applications that know how to do this right.
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